What Is Research & Explore?
Research & Explore is a conversational interface to your archive. You pick a scope (one accession, several, a dossier, or your whole archive), ask questions in plain language, and get cited answers grounded in your material.
Available on Professional plans and above.
How it differs from Search
| Search | Explore | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Finding items | Finding answers |
| Input | Keywords, filters | Questions in natural language |
| Output | Result cards with metadata | A composed answer with citations |
| Strengths | Exact matches, faceted browsing | Synthesis across many items, follow-ups |
| Limitations | Doesn't compose | Slower; can sometimes mis-cite |
Search and Explore complement each other. A typical flow: search to find candidate items, then start an Explore session on those items to ask follow-up questions.
What Explore can do
- Answer questions that span several items — "What does the correspondence say about the 1956 dispute?"
- Build timelines from heterogeneous sources — "List every meeting where the Smith case was raised, in chronological order."
- Surface entities — "Who else is named alongside Mary Thornton in these letters?"
- Find gaps — "Are there years between 1880 and 1920 where I have no material from this family?"
- Compose narrative — "Summarise the development of housing policy in this fond"
Each answer cites the items it drew from; you can click through to see the source material.
What Explore can't do
- Answer questions about anything outside your archive. It knows what you've uploaded; it doesn't know the rest of history.
- Read un-OCR'd material. If a document hasn't been transcribed, its content is invisible to the model.
- Be 100% accurate. The model can mis-cite, miss nuance, or over-generalise. Treat answers as research leads, not final claims.
Plan limits
| Plan | Model | Sessions / month | Messages / session | Context budget |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community | — | 0 (not available) | — | — |
| Professional | Gemini 3 Flash | 20 | 50 | 1M tokens |
| Team | Gemini 3 Flash | 50 | 100 | 1M tokens |
| Enterprise | Gemini 3 Pro | Unlimited | 200 | 1M tokens |
Each conversation is one session. Each message you send counts toward the per-session message cap.
What's next?
- Starting a session — the new-exploration flow
- Asking good questions — how to phrase questions to get useful answers